[MUD-Dev] Spawning and quests (was Sony ban)

[F. Randall Farmer]

> Jeff Freeman <skeptack at antisocial.com> wrote:

>   -- Upon a party of people (one or more) entering an "area" or
> "quest path" a unique and distinct copy of all the rooms and objects
> in that section is created.
>
>   -- This copy persists until no more players are present in the
> "fragment".  Once it is fully empty, it is deleted/recycled.
>
>   -- The copy can be customised in some fashion, perhaps tailored to
> the people in the party, or just random seed factors so that no two
> copies are ever quite alike.
>
>   -- The party can then do whatever they want in that area,
> unaffected by what is happening in that same area by people who
> entered earlier or later (and thus got their own private areas).
>
> This is of course rather similar to what Nathan Yospe talked about a
> while ago in an effort to resolve a not entirely dissimilar problem.
> (Nathan, want to expound?)  Ardent archive searchers are challenged
> to find the relevent threads (my memory is too sparse to give good
> key words).

I've been lucky enough to be a member of two teams who have implemented
"shadow" copies of "realms" for individuals and groups. Let me say this:
They
work great, as long as people win different "shadows" don't need to join
each other. Parallel copies of spaces can be quite jarring.

Oracle whispers to you: "I'm in the Royal Throne Chamber, sitting on the
throne."
You whisper to Oracle: "I'm standing right in front of the throne, and you
aren't here!"

For spaces that are inherently _single_ user, it works the best. WorldsAway
(now
known as VZones) uses this for new user hatcheries where the user can
practice
alone before being dumped into the head-stealing populous. :-) They also
used
it successfully for single-user mazes.

For The Palace we also use this technique for very large "arena" events.
In this case, we use "cloned" rooms to hold "shadow" copies of performers
and a small number (about 15) audience members. The "stage" is duplicated
100s of times, but the "master stage" only sees a few camera connections.
This accoplishes an entirely different goal: scaling in the message-fanning
domain. [Yes, I know that is a bit off topic, but it _is_ an important
benefit
of the technique under discussion.] :-)

Personally, some day when _I_ get to design a MMPG, it might well make
extensive use of an advanced evolution of this mechinism as I've found that
it addresses a big pile of problems while introducing a few oddities which
I'd just weave into the backstory. :-)

Randy














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